


and on into black

by teprometo



Series: 2013 Summer Pornathon [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Last Time, M/M, Post-Episode: s05e13, Team Gluttony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-06
Updated: 2013-07-06
Packaged: 2017-12-20 02:52:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/882085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teprometo/pseuds/teprometo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur always came with the lightning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and on into black

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2013 Summer Pornathon week two challenge: [Multimedia](http://summerpornathon.livejournal.com/90175.html). I was inspired by two sound clips: one of someone walking on gravel and one of a thunderstorm.

Merlin hasn’t heard the soothing crunch of boots on gravel in nearly eight months, but that doesn’t stop him tearing back the drapes to look out at the old path anyway, his mind inventing sounds he longs to hear out of grief and desperate, misplaced hope. It’s not a sound he’ll ever hear again, he knows. Even if someone happens down the walk, it will never be the same as those heavy feet and their warrior’s gait, out of place in a world that’s forgotten.

  


Arthur always came with the lightning, riding thunder to Merlin’s door and bringing the wet with him, pressing it against Merlin’s front. His mouth was electric when he kissed Merlin, the door still open and the rain blowing inside, his body shielding Merlin as he slipped cold hands under his T-shirt.

Merlin didn’t know where Arthur went, but it made him ravenous, slamming the door shut and shoving Merlin against it, holding his chin and staring at him. Merlin buried his nose in Arthur’s neck, finding him there beneath the metallic scent of rain, needing this: his skin, his sweat, precious and irreplaceable.

“Stay with me,” Merlin said for the thousandth time because he couldn’t help himself. He would never stop trying to tether Arthur to him with his magic and, when that failed, with his limbs, wrapping his arms and legs around Arthur’s back as Arthur fucked him, slow and deep, thumb in Merlin’s mouth, watching.

“What if this were the last time?” Arthur asked, and the question would have terrified Merlin instantly if he hadn’t been so far lost in the haze of arousal and Arthur, his proximity and heat and the smell of him.

“Every time is the last time,” Merlin said into his mouth, pausing to lick inside. “And the first time.” It took Merlin a moment to catch up, his stomach lurching as he realised there would never be another storm strong enough to bring Arthur to his door.

Arthur stilled him, hands strong on Merlin’s hips as he pulled away. He took Merlin’s hand and lubed it generously, said, “I want you to.”

Merlin pressed his fingers to Arthur’s entrance, a first in their centuries of being not quite together but never irrevocably separated. He felt Arthur’s heat, watched his face—the downturned corners of his mouth, the furrow of his brow—every piece of this experience unique. As Merlin sunk his cock in, he pushed Arthur’s fringe back, held his hand across the seam at his hairline as though Arthur were as feverish as Merlin felt. He startled a gasp out of Arthur and then a moan until he was groaning in earnest, eyes closed and chest heaving. Merlin tried to memorise each sensation: the curling of Arthur’s fingers around his arm, the way Arthur’s breaths came short and loud, his body quaking with how new this was, how final.

“Wish I’d let you do this before,” Arthur said.

Nothing could be done to rectify this, to give Arthur more time. All his life had been used up, squandered on a handful of frantic fucks in Merlin’s cabin, their hunger for touch destroying all capacity for growth together. Time and longing had made them tired, made them crack apart when they touched, but they hadn’t changed at all.

Arthur promised an end to lamenting the sunshine, the places they couldn’t touch and the things they couldn’t have. With his release sticky between them and Merlin’s thumb fucking into his arse, rubbing his come deeper as though it would allow them some permanence, Arthur told him:

“I know how to die.”

  


For the second time, Merlin held Arthur through his passing, tore open every old wound that had never fully healed. He kissed his king, loved him desperately, and buried him, not above water but underground, permanent this time. Arthur would someday be nothing but bones, and Merlin … Merlin would always _be_.

  


Merlin can’t help feeling that Arthur has really died this time, that being born again means losing everything they were. It hadn’t even been half a life, cut to shreds and drowning in all the time they couldn’t share, but it had still been Arthur then. A new Arthur is unthinkable, pale and incomplete, and Merlin knows that even when he’s lost his own identity, the intimate knowledge of Arthur will never leave him.

“You’ll find me,” Arthur had said. “You’ll make me remember.”

Merlin sits in his cabin and waits to forget.


End file.
